High Output Management by Andrew Grove

 

Typically, I wouldn’t even consider reading something with the words ”output” and ”management” in its title. The rest of the cover hardly gets better. Grove poses next to the Intel logo wearing a blue dress shirt and one hand on his hip. For some inexplicable reason, he’s wearing his employee ID card. To me, everything about High Output Management screams vanity project and CEO grandstanding. Most CEOs seem to end up writing (or, more accurately, commissioning from a ghost writer) some kind of management opus in retirement. A few recent examples include Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Ray Dalio - though Dalio’s Principles is better than most, even if Bridgewater allegedly doesn’t operate as diligently as it lets on.

So what made me read High Output Management? First, it’s almost required reading at work; some managers gift it to new employees and I wanted to find out what the fuss was about. Second, Grove and this book are still highly regarded in startup land, even though most of the material was finished pre internet bubble and Grove himself has since passed away. Later I found out that Grove isn’t your average CEO either. He fled communist Hungary to study in the United States and was the first employee at Intel. In his early work, he focused on research and development and was proficient in the actual engineering of microprocessors to the point of contributing to a college textbook on the topic.

High Output Management isn’t a memoir though. It’s best described as a mix between a college lecture series and a Harvard Business Review article. The first third uses a breakfast diner to explain the birth of the modern manufacturing economy. It’s quite clever and well presented and wouldn’t put off someone who only has a passing interest in what a critical production path is. Imagine you are the owner of a small restaurant that serves eggs and bacon. What steps would you need to take to grow that business into a national chain? Grove walks you through each step and slowly builds a compelling argument for the existence of factories, supply chains and ownership structures. I wouldn’t mind if it was the basis of Introduction to Industrial Engineering at my alma mater.

The rest of High Output Management doesn’t hold up as well. Some parts are hilariously out of date with vague references to how the Internet will revolutionize office communication and possibly upend the fax machine business. Grove, of course, is right in principal but the passages serve no other purpose today than to remind us how difficult prediction is. Some time is wasted on introducing the novel management term: ”task relevant maturity”. No one would guess from the term alone that Grove wants managers to understand that employees need different kinds of support depending on how experienced they are. Junior employees, who don’t have a lot of ”task relevant maturity”, need more regular and explicit guidance from their supervisors. It only sounds clever due to the inscrutable name and dubious acronym TRM. High Output Management is exactly what it says it is: a (somewhat distinguished) guidebook for (somewhat self-serious) middle managers.